Connecting with the Spirit

Is that all there is, is that all there is?

If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing

Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

If that’s all there is.

Peggy Lee

We were walking home together from a New Year’s Eve party. It had been a good night as parties go. The food was tasty and plentiful. The company was cheerful. The band was upbeat and talented. We had eaten, conversed and danced the night away to our hearts’ content. And now, in the wee hours of the morning, we were heading home to start another year. As the snow crunched beneath our feet, the sky above erupted in colour. Vivid reds, greens, blues, whites and yellows danced before our upturned faces, the most incredible display of Northern Lights I have ever witnessed. As I stood there in that dark night, watching the sky above me, I thought about the party we had just attended and the year that had just begun, the beauty of the night, and then deep inside the words of the song above rang through my mind. “Is that all there is?”

This feeling was a constant companion throughout the years that I lived my life with my first husband. Throughout the years I raised my children. Years that should have been filled with happiness, laughter, contentment and the joy of meeting a challenge, but instead I experienced the nagging reminder time and again that, no matter what was happening to me, I was missing out on something. Something very important. Something crucial to life itself. And I was.

Although this thought was with me often, I never mentioned it to anyone. I never quite knew what to do with it. At times I blamed myself for not being satisfied with what life had to offer. I blamed myself for not getting things right. But nothing I did seemed to help. I looked to my marriage, my children, my home, my family, an education, a job, a healthy body, and still I wasn’t happy. This was because the answer did not lie in the world around me, but deep within. My spirit was crying out in the wilderness of my self, trying to get my attention. Trying to get me to move to living on my life line. Trying to show me how important it was to be true to myself.

I was in my thirties before I began to change. I had wasted a good portion of time on this earth, living as a pseudo self, escaping the reality of my days through coping skills and destroying my body in the process. No, I was not resorting to drowning my sorrows in liquor as is suggested in the song, but I was hiding behind a wall of fat created by the food I was eating to numb my feelings. My life journey focused on striving to get through each day instead of achieving anything.

Throughout these years, I thought I was in touch with my spirit. I was a Christian. I had accepted Christ as my personal savior. I attended church and studied the Bible. I was totally aware of the fruits of the Holy Spirit and used them regularly. I lived what most people would call a good life, not because I was necessarily a good person, but because I didn’t have the desire to do anything else. And yet in the midst of all this, I wasn’t in touch with my own spirit. I might have been in contact with my creator, but I was wasting his most precious gift: my self.

This message of dissatisfaction from my spirit also came to me through recurrent dreams that I didn’t understand. They all involved a house: a house I had acquired in different ways, as a gift, as an inheritance, through purchase, or at times one of the houses I had lived in, in the past. No matter how I acquired the house, its state was still the same. In the beginning of the dream the house was ugly and derelict from the outside, and stayed the same as I entered the door and went from room to room. But then something changed. There came a point when there were more rooms than one would anticipate, looking at the exterior of the house. These were secret rooms to which only I knew the passage. Once within them, the house became more and more luxurious, of unbelievable beauty and quality. The space and the beauty went on and on until I woke up.

When I went back to college in my mid thirties, I attended a psychology class in which our professor asked us to share a recurring dream. I shared this one with our group and the students all speculated as to what it could mean. Nothing they said clicked with me. Then the professor offered her explanation. She told me that I was the house and that all of the beauty I was experiencing in the dream was the beauty of my inner self. This beauty was being hidden from the world by the life I was currently living. Only I had the power to reveal this beauty to the world. Thus began my real journey to self, a journey in which I am attempting to share that beauty with others. It has taken a long time.

Although I have learned many different lessons over the years, the last dozen years have been a real eye opener. The model of the self has opened my eyes to so many different things, but most of all it has allowed me to truly get in touch with my own spirit. It started with a meditation exercise during my Master’s program where we were to visualize a journey. I found myself getting off a train at a deserted railway station in the middle of the desert. As I stepped off the wooden platform onto the sand I realized I was totally and completely alone in an alien land. A sense of peace and calm came over me and I realized for the first time in my life that I was all right, exactly as I was. I was safe, no matter where I was. I didn’t need anyone else. I didn’t need to fit in any mold. I didn’t need to change in order to succeed. I could just be Gail, and that was okay.

This led to a freedom I hadn’t experienced since I was a small child. This led to a celebration of life that has continued on, every day since. A celebration of the simple joys in life. A celebration of the incredible vastness of our world and everything that is in it. A celebration of the beauty of creation. A celebration of who I am as a person, without any barriers. A celebration of each person I meet for their own unique role on earth. The more I allow myself to be me, the more I shine through and the more I allow others to be themselves. The more I am me, the more joy I experience. The sense of dissatisfaction is completely gone. Not because I found something outside that filled my needs, but because I went within and found myself. Not because I did anything incredible, but because I accepted the reality that it was okay to be me. That acceptance led me to the point where I was not only living on my life line, but also closely connected to my spirit.

I no longer search for happiness. Instead it finds me. No matter what I am doing, a feeling of joy envelops me without warning. I bask in its presence knowing full well that this may be all there is, and it is far more than enough!